Server virtualization enables companies to increase efficiency and uptime while lowering hardware capital expenses and operations spending. It also poses a number of significant power management opportunities.

Eaton’s Intelligent Power Manager (IPM) can help IT managers reap the benefits of virtualization. In particular, it comes with a plug-in for Citrix’ XenCenter Server, currently a well-positioned virtualization management solution in the market. It enables IT managers to administer their backup power and power distribution assets in sophisticated ways via the same console they use to manage their physical and virtual servers.

This technology brief discusses the factors behind virtualization’s skyrocketing popularity, as well as the power management difficulties that virtualized data centers often encounter. It then provides an overview of how IPM helps mitigate those complexities, along with detailed step-by-step instructions for installing and using the IPM plug-in for XenCenter.

 

Virtualization and power management

Eager to save money and time while maintaining continual uptime, businesses are rapidly implementing server virtualization. In fact, nearly 80 percent of server workloads supported by x86 hardware will be running on virtual machines (VMs) by 2016, according to analyst firm Gartner Inc.

Given the many and significant benefits it offers, virtualization’s exploding popularity is easy to understand. Chief among those benefits are these:

• Lower hardware capital expenses: Conventional data centers typically feature large numbers of lightly utilized servers. Converting those physical machines into virtual ones consolidates the number of power devices being used and significantly lowers server-related hardware spending.

• Easier hardware administration: Reducing physical servers lessens operational and capital expenses, by decreasing hardware purchase and administration burdens.

• More efficient use floor space: Consolidating servers through virtualization enables organizations to fit more processing and storage capacity into an existing footprint, delaying the need for costly construction projects.

• Enhanced availability: Server virtualization solutions equipped with “live migration” capabilities can relocate VMs from one host device to another quickly, enabling companies to keep critical applications up and running during power outages, hardware failures and maintenance procedures.

Power management challenges created by virtualization

Though it offers many compelling benefits to IT equipment, virtualization does complicate power management in a number of ways.

For example, many organizations use virtualization management software to administer host servers, VMs and more. At present, though, users of virtualization management suites must usually employ a separate set of management tools to monitor their power infrastructure, decreasing the productivity of their technicians and potentially delaying response times when problems occur.

Additionally, while live migration capabilities can move VMs dynamically from one host server to another under a variety of conditions, few such products offer built-in functionality for migrating virtual workloads automatically during power outages, when the function is most often needed.

Download the Eaton Power Manager Software here.

Download the Eaton Tech Brief and Users Guide here.

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